CULTURAL WORKINGS

Welcome to THE CULTURAL WORKER, a blog dedicated to arts of the people ranging from the radical avant garde and free jazz to dissident folk forms and popular arts . The Cultural Worker celebrates revolutionary creativity and features a variety of essays, reviews, fiction, reportage, poetry and musings through the internet pen of this writer, musician and cultural organizer. Scroll straight down and you'll also find an extensive historical Photo Exhibit of cultural workers in action, followed by a series of Radical Arts Links. The features herein will be unabashedly partisan---make no mistake about that. The concept of the cultural worker as a force of fearless creativity, of social change, indeed as an artistic arm of radicalism, has always been left-wing when applied with any degree of honesty at all. No revolutionary act can be truly complete in the absence of art, no progressive campaign can retain its message sans the daring drumbeat of invention, no act of dissent can stand so strong as that which counts the writers, musicians, painters, dancers, actors, photographers, film and performance artists within its ranks. Here's to the history and legacy of cultural work in the throes of the good fight...john pietaro

Sunday, June 23, 2013

ED: John Pietaro is a New York
activist musician. He plays vibraphone, xylophone, drumkit, frame drums,
hand drums, percussion, voice. He has performed with artists including
Alan Ginsberg, Karl Berger, Fred Ho, Arturo O’Farril, Salim Washington,
John Zorn, Pete Seeger, Amina Baraka, Blaise Siwula, Ras Moshe, Cheryl
Pyle, Elodie Lauten, Carsten Radke, Rudresh Mahanthapa, and many more.
Pietaro directs the ensembles RADIO NOIR (http://www.reverbnation.com/radionoir)
, THE DISSIDENT ARTS ORCHESTRA, and THE RED MICROPHONE, a quartet of
revolutionary musicians. He also performs with KARL BERGERS IMPROVISERS
ORCHESTRA and free-lances in NYC. He is the founder of THE DISSIDENT
ARTS FESTIVAL and has spoken on arts activism at Left Forum and other
venues. Pietaro writes for Z Magazine and many other progressive
journals and wrote a chapter for the Harvey Pekar/Paul Buhle book SDS: A
GRAPHIC HISTORY (2007 Hill and Wang). He is currently writing an
extensive history of protest arts and a book about the No Wave movement,
and completed a volume of contemporary proletarian fiction.

Here we talk with Pietaro about
what the Dissident Arts Festival represents in a collective situation.
We look at this in the current struggle for freedom of the individual
even within the goal of building a network of progressive forces. There
is the need to value one’s individual sensibility and reality and
dreams ( that of course are part of reality) in a world that seems to be
going downward – and wants to keep to the people in the lowest common
denominator , where the individual seems to be nonexistent and sometimes
the society seems to become a system to put each one at a standard
level to make the characteristic of each person banal in the name of
homologation.

JP: I first conceived
of the idea for the Dissident Arts Festival in 2006, after enduring
years of the Bush presidency and dealing with the fallout of his
right-wing policies. By day I work as a labor organizer, so I saw the
effects of this conservative, anti-worker administration close-up. The
National Labor Relations Board had been decimated by this regime and he
and other conservatives were doing their best to defame unions whenever
possible. The wealthy were getting tax breaks as the middle- and
working-class were being cast aside. Bush was an incompetent, a failed
businessman who openly befriended the kings of corporate America—the
very force that had been greedily built up by the right-wing and were
especially supported in those Bush years. We were engaged in an
unlawful war, citizens were being spied on, social service programs were
being slashed, women’s rights were being threatened, the poor were
vilified and there was a terrible divisiveness throughout the country.
As an artist of conscience as well as a Leftist, I recognized the need
to speak up through radical creativity. I reached out to a variety of
musicians as well as poets and guest speakers to create that first
Festival . At the time many topical singers were involved, invoking the
great body of work of the folk-protest movement, but jazz musicians were
also present as were rock balladeers. Over the years the scope of the
Festival has gone increasingly avant garde and while there were still
some sing-songwriters involved this year, most of the artists were those
who hold a presence in the free jazz and new music world. The 2012
Festival was truly the best one yet and it occurred in two venues, one
in Greenwich Village and one in Brooklyn. Our reach grows further and
the goal is to unify more and more artists—as well as audience
members—under a collective umbrella of radical music.

ED: Here it can be interesting
to connect and recall one of the latest interviews, in 1975, of the
Italian intellectual, writer and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini who talked
about his film taken from the Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, but set
during the Republic of Salò in 1944-1945.

In some points of the interview
the Italian filmmaker declared that “today’s ideal is consumerism” –
there he was talking about Italy in particular – “there is an enormous
group extending from Milano to Bologna, it includes Rome and spreads to
the South. It is an homologating civilization that make everything the
same. So it is clear that the barriers fall that small group disband….a
consumer ideology, you don’t…instead of having a flag, the clothes they
wear are their flag. Some of the means and some of the external
phenomenal have changed but in practice, it is a depauperation of
individuality which is disguised through its valorization. […]
‘Permissive’ societies permit a few things, and only those things can be
done.[..] Today 1975 it is a power that manipulates the bodies in a
horrible way, it has nothing to envy to of Himmler’s or Hitler’s
manipulation. It manipulates them , transforming their conscience, in
the worst way, establishing new values which are alienating and false.
The values of consumerism, which accomplish what Marx called genocide of
the living, real, previous cultures. […] ‘I lower my head in the name
of God’ is already a great phrase. While now, the consumer does not even
know he lowers his head, to the contrary he stupidly believes he has
not lowered it and that he has won his rights.[…]”.

JP: Sadly, it is often
the goal of any government to secure some kind of control over its
citizenry. Sometimes this is done by brute, oppressive force as in
fascism. Other times it is done via a bastardization of a unifying
philosophy: Stalin manipulated Marxism for his own sense of glory and
gain. In the USA we have seem a homogenization of the populace at
various points and through various means. The dictates of the fashion
industry are a seemingly benign arm of conformism but how the fashion
mogul would love to have everyone in their clothing! Advertising pushes
us, pulls us and can become a background drone that can be inescapable.
Here in the very bowels of capitalism, it is easy to recognize the power
of the wealthiest corporate leaders and their sway on the public.
Sometimes we are unable to purchase products the industry machine has
forcibly made unavailable, sometimes we are tricked into making the
purchase the corporate powers guide us to. These factors can and do lead
to a rather faceless population, one devoid of a real sense of self and
a thorough course of development. But even here in a nation with an
intact Bill of Rights we have seen points where the manipulation, the
coercion of a power goes much further. Usually those times have been in
the shadow of an outside threat that a government can opportunistically
magnify in order to frighten people into a willing homogenization. The
best example in the USA would have to be in the late 1940s – ‘50s Red
Scare—which actually lasted into the 1970s and was actually reinvented
by Ronald Reagan’s Administration in the 1980s. But in those high years
of the Cold War, American citizens were investigated by agents of the
government, blacklisted, terrorized and humiliated. It was an age of
fear and conformity and false patriotism (which begat nationalism and
xenophobia) under the guise of national security. The House UnAmerican
Activities Committee and the Senate Sub-Committee on UnAmerican
Activities (where McCarthy became the rising star) as well as smaller,
local governmental committees, tried artists, intellectuals, teachers ,
municipal employees and union leaders in public hearings in order to
break their organizations and means of communication. This was the
boldest example of in American history one could think of and the
tactics of these bodies was dangerously close to the methods of the
Nazis.

ED: To keep here, for these
thoughts we are talking about, the line of his declarations, “[..]I
think that no artist in any society is free. Being crushed by the
normality and by the mediocrity of any society in which he lives, the
artist is a living contestation. He always represents the contrary of
that idea that every man in every society has of himself. In my opinion,
a minimum, perhaps immeasurable, margin of freedom is always there. I
can’t say to what point this is , or is not freedom. But certainly ,
something that escapes the mathematical logic of mass culture, for the
time being. [..]”.

JP: Well, Bertolt
Brecht also said that the artist is the ultimate whore. We sell off
pieces of ourselves in order to eat and we almost always compromise our
values in doing so. And John Reed argued that without dissent, there can
be no radical democratic movement. We as artists get to speak out in a
manner that others cannot. Even musicians who dedicate their career to
commercial music, poets who write greeting cards for a living, visual
artists who spend their days painting still-lifes to be hung in hotel
rooms, we cannot lose the inner artist, the force within us that has
allowed us to create in the first place. Like many, I have a day job but
the music is in my head at all times and every night I can go home and
play music, perform for the public, compose, go to jam sessions. This is
something bigger than the individual yet it is purely of the individual
as a means of expression. How does the rest of the world do it? How can
they go home from their jobs and watch the ball game on TV, drink a
beer and go to bed? The freedom is within us and we must constantly
embrace it so that our art can be whole, so that we can produce an
inspired kind of creativity that can enlighten others.

ED: Recently Pietaro has been
working on a new project with local professional musicians in NYC and
also from other countries. Can you talk us about the name‘Radical Arts Front’ and what a collective like ‘Radical Arts Front’ wants to be?

JP : Just to clarify, a
front in Left politics is not really with reference to a war zone:
think of the United Front, the gathering of Left activists in the early
30s all in opposition to fascism. This collective allowed them to tear
down the walls that separated communists, socialists, Trotskyists. Later
it expanded to the Popular Front which included social democrats and
liberals too. My idea for the collective is just that—a gathering of
experimental, free jazz, new music, avant garde musicians who have
strong convictions about a people’s movement, about equality, peace,
workers’ rights, ecology and other progressive issues. Yes, many of us
will be socialists in general, some Marxists, some engaged in a variety
of Left parties and organizations—but others will be more general
activists who have varying degrees of progressive thinking. This is why
we are standing as a united front, albeit one united as much by our
drive toward an advanced art as advanced socio-political philosophy

The October Jazz Revolution (October 20,
2012), a concert featuring some of the most revolutionary musicians in
New York now, will be the first official event under the banner of the
collective. And then one week later, there is a performance of the
Dissident Arts Orchestra, playing a live improvised score for the German
Expressionist film ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’.

I am not building a collective that will
necessarily engage in meetings or require dues of any kind, it will
serve as a resource for each musician involved. A collective such as
this would enable us to seek opportunities, to have a list of musicians
from which to draw from for gigs, quick access to referrals for gigs
that may come up (especially if they are directly tied into social
justice movements), and more than anything else, a banner under which we
might be able to work, a brand which will help with public relations
and outreach. My plan, if we have enough interest, is to seek out
not-for-profit status and use it to seek out grants for concerts under
this banner—-because the goal for me has always been to be able to pay
musicians for events I organize. This will not only inspire more
participation but growth of the entire concept of an artist-driven
organization which reaches into issues beyond art’s sake. The big
difference between what I am seeking to build and earlier protest music
organizations is that those (such as People’s Songs) were usually
comprised of folksingers. This collective will focus only on
experimental, free jazz, new music performers/improvisers/composers who
hold Left philosophies and engage in activism of any degree. Some may
seek only a more defined kind of revolutionary activism, others may not
wish to be associated with any kind of radical organization and most
will fit somewhere in between. Whichever path the collective’s members
choose, it would be great to be able to engage in this together and of
course in concert with existing Left artists organizations such as
Scientific Soul Sessions, Occupy Music and the like. As musicians of
conscience, we all have a lot to consider.

Ultimately I would love to see this
collective become a means to make funding available for a series of
events that seek to bridge progressive and radical politics to
forward-looking music. If you see yourself as an activist in any way,
particularly as it applies to your music, do you also see the strength
in a unified action? Events such as my Dissident Arts Festival need to
grow, but I would like this umbrella to expand and help to produce a
wide variety of concerts. A familiar banner over many of our events can
allow us to attract more attention and increase not only our audience as
well as our radical message. The politics are not bound by a particular
school or philosophy, but suffice to say that the outlook is Left:
ranging from outright revolutionary to general progressive and in every
case, an organization to celebrate individual expression as well as a
collective sensibility. For more information please visit my website:

-The songs »L’Internationale Redux » and « Brecht Breakdown » by the Red Microphone (recorded in October 2012)
-The EP ‘The Lost Broadcast’ (2011) by Radio NOIR.
- His protest song ensemble the Flames of Discontent recorded two full
CDs: ‘I Dreamed I Heard Joe Hill Last Night….A Century of IWW Songs’
(2005) and ‘Revenge of the Atom Spies’ (2007)

Pietaro’s Bibliography
-Numerous cultural articles and reviews in Z Magazine, the People’s
World, Political Affairs, and other Left periodicals including pieces in
the Nation, the Industrial Worker and others (1999-present).
-STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY: A GRAPHIC HISTORY by Harvey Pekar
and Paul Buhle (Hill & Wang, 2007): He wrote the chapter « I Ain’t
Marchin’ Anymore: Phil Ochs and SDS »
-NIGHT PEOPLE AND OTHER STORIES OF WORKING NEW YORK (2011, short stories of contemporary proletarian fiction, unpublished)
-Current unfinished projects include the book THE CULTURAL WORKERS: a history of protest arts in the USA, 1900-Today

Saturday, June 22, 2013

There was this house, this two-story,
multi-generational house in Bensonhurst. It was one house that contained two
households, two nuclear families, but inextricably interwoven, and it vibrated
with the intense sights and sounds and scents of cliché working-class Italian
American life. For the uninitiated amongst you that translates as LOUD.

The doors in this house were always open, between
floors, among rooms, and the voices coming in and out, over and under, never
ceased. Like merging traffic, they rumbled on, leaking through walls and levels,
a Technicolor commentary at every dynamic level. Grandmotherly drama and
grandfatherly cantankerousness, mother’s exasperation and father’s street humor;
the ongoing shouts and stomps of us, the children in this house: me, my older brother
James, and then a few years later, brother Joe --who was in training from the
start to seek out still newer means to stretch the boundaries of volume. And
somehow in the midst of all of this motion
…there was Uncle Mike.

Without even really trying, in his own learned,
welcoming manner, he made the noise go away. When I was little, when Mike was
still living in this family home, I would visit with him in his room often. It
was a treat, like a wonderland in there with countless model airplanes and
ships, expertly put together and artistically painted, right down to the
features on the miniature passengers aboard. A few of the model planes were
suspended from the ceiling for realism and he also had metal planes with
moveable parts that were absolutely cool to me. On the shelves where many of
the models stood, he also had books---books
that he actually read! There was also more than one baseball under glass, signed
by teams’ members that seemed like they were a hundred years old to me. Next to
the baseballs were model figures of some hero players: Mickey Mantle and Yogi
Berra and more. I don’t think Mike was ever much for sports---he was the arts
guy in our family and I felt a real connection to that. I am sure that the
sporting paraphernalia were gifts, probably from my grandfather, but he had
them out for all to see along with other keepsakes and novelties on display.

There were superhero comic books, Mad magazines and monster magazines
hanging around; enjoyment of the fantastic, the suspenseful and the wildest of imaginations was something else we both always
enjoyed, and something else that Mike welcomed me to become a part of---he
always loved a good creature feature and so do I still.

On the walls of his room were portraits of JFK,
who’d been a real hero to Mike as a young man. He also had ‘60s-ish posters, and
a framed original sketch or two. And I can still remember his mirror, standing
over the dresser, with stickers from Kingsborough Community College exhibited, keeping
watching over his metal comb and brush set (the military kind), some rosary
beads and a change cup. And of course my reflection, the one I was sure
lingered in there even after I’d gone back upstairs. His room also contained a
cabinet with Mike’s record collection secured inside, a most prized item, the
majority of which he maintained through the decades, right up until today. And
that brings us to music….

Due to a couple of years of compromised health in
his own young life, Mike had engaged thoroughly in the arts: drawing, painting,
writing, but none of these pursuits moved him more than music. He would
tell me years later that when he turned 11 he’d found an old pair of bongos in
the house and listened to the latest Chubby Checker records and drummed along on
them with a pair of sticks, possibly something he’d liberated from a Chinese
restaurant. Playing a simple Twist rhythm across these old bongos had moved him
so, driven him beyond the shy kid who’d spent some summers indoors---and also
got him singing. Ultimately he began tapping along to every song that came
across his record player, the radio or the family hi-fi. Everyone who knew Mike
over the years can tell you that he couldn’t sit still when a good song was on
in the background. His fingers were dancing with his leftie lead in a
rock-n-roll beat. But he could also get that enthusiastic when nothing was on in the background—he only
needed to have a song going around his head…and he usually did. Mike would drum
along on table tops with fingers, or an ankle crossed over his knee, or on his
thigh with a pair of drumsticks or on any surface in arm’s reach, throw his
head back and offer up a bit of the phantom verse in his best rock-n-roll tenor…

Drumming was so much a part of his inner pulse that,
when he was 14, Mike got my grandparents
to buy him a drumkit which he kept set up in the basement. In my earliest
memories, he was proudly seated up high behind a gorgeous aquamarine sparkle
set of Premier drums (English made!) with glowing Zildjian cymbals. Nothing
could look more compelling to me, especially when he was down there rehearsing
with his band---one that always included his dearest friend, Buddy, on bass.
When the band was playing, you could feel it throughout the house and in warm
weather when everyone’s windows were open, they serenaded the block. How
majestic! As a child I watched and listened and decided immediately that I
wanted to---needed to---become a musician. I can still recall the tightness in
my abdomen and the slight breathlessness I got as he kicked out the rhythm. The
community of people around him, both band-mates and friends was so welcoming.
These folks were different than those in my immediate purview as a kid---they
were artists, hippies, biker-types and other renegades, so many wonderful
examples of that generation. Exposure to a few of these summer-of-love types fueled my own Left-wing philosophy and
activism. But there was also so much laughter and fun and a real sense of
commitment. Theresa was the heart of this wider group and I have fond memories
of her limitless affection of us scruffy little kids running around during band
practice.

After Mike and Theresa married and moved into an
apartment of their own, his old room seemed far too empty and the house somehow
too roomy. The music had stopped---at least for a few years. It was in my fourteenth year that I pushed MY
parents to let me get a drumkit. Mike was there to advocate for this and then
accompanied me on a trip to buy some second hand drums and helped me to set
them up, taught me how to tune them and offered some basic tutelage as well. My
own journey would ultimately take me to formal training and I became a jazz
percussionist, but Mike always offered an enthusiastic response to whatever I
was doing. We never stopped talking about drums and drumming and his knowledge
of music history was vast. It mattered not that he was a self-taught player, he
maintained an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the great studio musicians, both
here and in the UK, which cuts they’d played on and how this band or that had splintered
off to form this one and how one school of rock had progressed into another,
and could site the best recorded examples too!

In more recent years he’d also taken to collecting
guitars---and the basement of Mike and Theresa’s house came to be akin to a
trip through the Gibson warehouse. You need a flashlight and tour-guide to find
your way out of the guitar forest. When he got into something, he became an
authority on it. He never missed a beat.

Mike’s hunger for knowledge never confined itself to
music---he was a fountain of information about film, theatre, politics and of
course the world’s history. I always gravitated to these subjects too and over
the decades we had much to talk about. I am sorry I never got to see one of his
lectures, but I think I get the idea. He could turn any basic description into
a thesis and leapt into the role of orator at any given chance. My wife Laurie
would be the first to tell you that this is not one of her favorite aspects of my personality…perhaps we can blame Mike
for that too.

My uncle was the Family Intellectual and radical. He
ushered in the roots of every artistic pursuit I ever had and my drive toward
dissent. Even when we didn’t get to speak for stretches, we always caught up
and shared. Life moves along quickly, far too quickly, but as an adult I began
to realize that Mike and I were actually quite close in age and really
interacted more the way cousins would, peers, rather than uncle and nephew. But
of course even with all of the depth of conversation Mike’s acerbic humor,
tendency toward satire and imitations, kept it light and enjoyable. He loved
riffing with jokes flying back and forth----there is no real attempt at holding
court without being entertaining. And that influence stays with me too.

These memories of Mike will carry me through these
days of his immediate loss and allow me to reflect on him later, and as I move
forward through my own life each time I set up my vibes or drums for a gig, every
time I write an article or I doodle in the margins of a page, or attend a
protest rally or tell a joke or spin a yarn, he will always be within reach.

Because Mike just cannot give up a good audience. Because
I still need to know he is there.

While the Vision Festival stands out as perhaps the
preeminent vehicle for experimental, improvisation-based musics in the nation,
it has also been controversial in its dogged pursuit of star-status performers
that are can draw large audiences. Sad that the scheduling continues to make
lesser-known performers feel closed out but one cannot deny that the organizers
know how to program concerts that never fail to blow the roof off of the house.
This year’s Festival was packed with brilliance but time constraints allowed me
to choose but part of one evening and so, as legendary harmolodic guitarist Bern
Nix has finally been called to the Vision stage, I couldn’t miss this one.
Happily, the noted poet Steve Dalachinsky, a welcome mainstay of Vision from
the start, had the opening set of the evening, one he performed with long-time
jazz pianist Connie Crothers. This pairing of spoken word/piano and
guitar-based combo appeared to be opposing forces initially but the evidence
was in quickly, proclaiming that this was another Vision Festival bit of
programming genius…

STEVE DALACHINSKY stepped forward and, positioning the
mic around his cherub-like smile, warned the audience, “I am hungry,
thirsty and nervous—so if this doesn’t work out as planned, I already have my
excuse in”, but Dalachinsky never had reason to make use of this disclaimer.
Embarking upon a solo statement of verse initially, he was joined by CONNIE
CROTHERS’ probing, compelling piano only as the second piece developed. The
musical landscape Crothers provided offered jarring 20th century runs which almost leapt from nowhere yet made so much sense to Dalachinsky’s often
surrealistic strings of logic. The poet pounced upon and danced around his own
verse, seemingly davoning over the microphone, infusing stutters, repetition,
vocalization and moments of Brooklynism as needed.

The stories within Dalachinsky’s poetry are gifted
with a loosening of association, at once flowing, staccato, urgent, breathless
and fearless. A sense of improvisation pervaded all, no matter that the lines
were being read from a page. It is HOW they were read that brought the piece
into the next realm, the manner in which the words tangled and tangoed with the music being
created of the moment. The overall effect was a tapestry of sound embedded
in Crothers piano and the liberated harmony of the eras of the modern and post-modern.
But the pianist effortlessly slipped into an expansive face of jazz just to
pull us all back into it, as Dalachinsky masterfully worked a sentence,
propelling it into the space above them and beyond the confines of the venue.

THE BERN NIX QUARTET came onto the stage of Roulette
as the house lights were up high and the audience was stretching between acts. Before
the MC had the chance to announce them, sound check blurred into performance, and
the warm yet almost percussive sound of BERN NIX’s guitar permeated the room. This
subtle, circling chord progression was quickly joined by FRANCOIS GRILLOT
(bass) and REGGIE SYLVESTER (drumkit), now swinging, now rolling in rhythmic counter-point.
MATT LAVELLE’s trumpet pierced the air pointillistically, filling the spaces of
this seemingly impromptu piece, one we would later learn to be titled, appropriately, “Don’t
Try So Hard”. As the lights rapidly dimmed, the band was introduced, in style,
over their slowly building soundscape. The piece developed into classic
harmolodics as Nix, hunched over his well-aged Gibson and almost obscured by
his music stand, dug in.

Grillot and Sylvester bring something new to the
terrain carved out decades ago by Haden and Blackwell. Nix’s years with Prime
Time are not lost to this rhythm section which can sound as funky as that
electric ensemble, though Grillot plays upright (and with monstrous technique!).
And Sylvester, while offering a perpetual motion burn, does so most often with
bundle sticks in place of standard drum sticks; heftier than wire brushes, they
give a rather non-direct attack. The drummer’s easy, acrobatic style made me
think of the nimble flights of a barefoot tap-dancer. Lavelle’s trumpet
breathed over the whole, giving off scat-like flurries and Cherry-ish
half-valve slides. The band began cooking immediately but was sure to build the
boil in different places and not necessarily all at the same time, causing the
sense of center to keep moving about, as it should in this lexicon.

And yet the second selection, “Under the Volcano”,
had the Quartet in gut-bucket mode with Sylvester leaning into the straight
8ths and Grillot slapping the body of his bass in patterns that pushed the
pulse ever forward. Lavelle, moving to alto clarinet for this number, played a composed
melody line with the leader, but once tearing into his solo offered a siren
wale that catapulted him outward. At times, Lavelle was reminiscent of Sonny
Simmons forays into double-reeds, pulling the sound from the high end of the
instrument’s range and from deep within himself. As Nix came into his own, the
R and B backbeat gave way to free---affixing the vibe of the original Coleman
quartet to that of the guitarist’s tenure with Prime Time. This band acts as
the nexus of the two eras we have come to know in the harmolodic sphere. After
the concert Nix explained:

“I always had a penchant for straight-ahead jazz
guitar playing; I play that still. Before I worked with Ornette, I never
thought I would be in Prime Time. But this music allows the harmony to shift,
like chase chords, moving through and beyond. It is in and it is out…the ‘swing’
is always there. This music is an extension on the early jazz tradition where
the sense of freedom, the improvisation, was constantly creative. Here the band’s
roles are never static and are always shifting, evolving…”

The band played two more numbers including a
pseudo-bossa (“Naomi”) with a trumpet melody that exposed Lavelle’s big band
influences, full-bodied and sporting a vibrato that ended phrases deftly. His
solo straddled the worlds of Harry James and Woody Shaw with ease, fingers
flying over valves, resounding. And just as this piece seemed to approach the
straight-ahead tradition, Nix’s solo brought in atonality (or was that
beyond-tonality?) and an expansive view of meter.

Bern Nix’s solos are really an extension of his
comping style as he grabs at barking, snapping single notes, diads and chords up
and down and then across his instrument’s neck, toying with repetitions before
tossing them aside for lines in advanced tonality. Kandinsky-esque staccato phrases
and linear, slippery runs alternate as the rhythm team pulsates contrapuntally
behind and through. Driven on by the improvisation of the moment, the drummer
and bassist fly and bounce, skimming over the surface of the groove when not
tearing into it and turning it on its head. Add Lavelle’s free trumpet into the
collective mix and the band appears to be working from four different centers,
creating a jigsaw melody almost played heterophonically between guitar lead,
trumpet and bass counter-melodies and the racing back-stroke of Sylvester’s
almost 4/4 jazz time. The Bern Nix Quartet is everywhere and exactly-where and
the overall effect is dizzying in the best possible way. This is the next
obvious step in the harmolodic world. To the uninitiated, this visionary music
can be somewhat confounding. To those who know better, this stuff is pure
sustenance.

About Me

John Pietaro, writer/musician/cultural organizer; Staff Writer, The NYC Jazz Record. Contributing Writer: Z Magazine, the Nation, CounterPunch, the Wire, many others. His latest book, ON THE CREATIVE FRONT: ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF LIBERATION, is under review for publication. Pietaro also wrote a chapter for the Harvey Pekar/Paul Buhle book SDS: A GRAPHIC HISTORY (2007 Hill &Wang). In 2013 he self-published a volume of contemporary proletarian fiction, NIGHT PEOPLE. Current projects: co-writing/editing the autobiography of Amina Baraka; authoring a novel. Founded NEW MASSES MEDIA in 2013, production/ publicity company. As a musician Pietaro performs on the NYC free jazz/new music circuit on hand drums, drumkit, vibraphone, percussion, voice. Over the years he has created music with Amina Baraka, Alan Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Karl Berger, Fred Ho, Ras Moshe, many more. Leader: the Red Microphone. Founder/producer, annual Dissident Arts Festival. Pietaro has spoken on arts activism at Left Forum, the Vision Festival and other venues. He is a member of the Author's Guild, PEN America, National Writers Union UAW 1981 and Jazz Journalists Association

NIGHT PEOPLE and Other Tales of Working NY

'THE RED MICROPHONE SPEAKS!' CD, 2013

"Revenge of the Atom Spies" (2007)

The Flames of Discontent: Laurie Towers & John Pietaro ..................SCROLL DOWN FOR an extensive 'PHOTO EXHIBIT' of cultural workers in history and a thorough list of 'RADICAL LINKS' !

'Little Red Song Book'

still fanning the flames

John Reed and Boardman Robinson, 1913

The revolutionary writer and political cartoonist in Europe

Edward Hopper

"Night on the El Train", 1918

Anti-War Dance

Anti-War Dance - WW1

Louis Fraina

Writer and early Communist movement leader was later purged from the CP in a haze of controversy. Currently all traces of him remain disappeared from official Party documents

William Gropper: "Revolutionary Age", July 1919

Organ of the Left-Wing of the SPUSA (roots of the CPUSA), edited by Louis Fraina

The Funeral of JOHN REED

1920--at the Kremlin Wall

'Metropolis'

Fritz Lang's powerful depiction of a futuristic society ruled by a lazy bourgeois totally dependent on the laboring of the workers in the depths of the city

'New Masses', 1928

Amazingly hip artwork by Louis Lozowick

Brecht in Leathers

Somehow encompasses all that was 30s Berlin and 70s New York all at the same time

The chilling art of Fred Ellis

from "The Daily Worker", 1931

Debs, with Max Eastman and Rose Pastor Stokes

The patron saint of the Socialist Party working closely with Communist Party cultural leaders--the arts can climb above the fray

'The Red Songbook'

compiled by members of the Composers Collective of NY, a CPUSA cultural organization

Langston Hughes

Eisler and Brecht

Composer Hanns Eisler and poet Bertolt Brecht, revolutionary artists

'Song of the United Front''

music by Hanns Eisler, lyric by Bertolt Brecht

Sid Hoff, 'The Daily Worker', 1930s

"Thank God he doesn't have to swim with the dirty masses in Coney Island"

Paul Robeson

performing for British strikers, 1930s

Stuart Davis

at work

'The Anvil'

Organ of the John Reed Club, 1934

The Rebel Song Book, 1935

Socialist Party cultural publication compiled by SP poet and journalist Samuel H. Friedman. In these fervant years Friedman almost singlehandedly led the Socialist arts program which included much live perforamnce, literature, lectures, gallery exhibits and even the radio station WEVD, named for Debs, which broadcast radio dramas, music and speeches.

The League of American Writers

1936 statement on the urgency of the Spanish Civil War by this powerfully united group of Left and liberal writers, coalesced through a CP initiaitive. The League was an an outgrowth of the American Writers Congress. As strong as this grouping was, its creation also sounded the death toll for the more radical John Reed Club, which was dissolved by Party leaders this same year.

'Waiting for Lefty', 1935

The Group Theatre's debut production of Odets immortal agit-prop play. Yes, that's a young Elia Kazan out in front shouting 'Strike! Strike!" decades before the crisis of conscience and career which saw him naming names in his second HUAC hearing. But wasn't this a time?

'Proletarin Literature in the United States'

1935, the first serious collection, edited by Granville Hicks and featuring the work of Mike Gold, Isidor Schneider, Joseph North, and other noted writers of the day

Artists Union

American Artists Congress, 1936

depicted by Stuart Davis

The Benny Goodman Quartet, 1937

Goodman's combo was revolutionary in that it was fully integrated in a time of terrible racism--further the Quartet laid down the ground work for all chamber jazz to come. The blurring solos of Lionel Hampton's vibraphone brought that instrument into the forefront as a major voice in jazz; Gene Krupa's drumming in this period also created a major role for percussionists in all aspects of this genre. Not to forget Teddy Wilson's brilliant piano playing and the clarinet of the leader!

Partisan Review editors, 1938

Phillip Rahv and Dwight McDonald and co.

'Native Son'

Richard Wright's groundbreaking novel, 1940

Disney Cartoonists Strike!

1941--the very radical cartoonists' union takes the studio by storm

Josh White, Leadbelly and friends

1940, NYC, BBC radio airshot

Leadbelly

"Bougeois Blues"

Carl Sandburg

He covered the march of Coxey's Army, became an early Socialist Party cultural worker and was still a beloved, celebrated elder of American folk culture!

John Howard Lawson, HUAC Hearing

speaking back to power

Hollywood on trial

The Ten included Herbert Biberman, screenwriter and director Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter John Howard Lawson, screenwriter Edward Dmytryk, director Adrian Scott, producer and screenwriter Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter Lester Cole, screenwriter Albert Maltz, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter Alvah Bessie, screenwriter Also the great Charlie Chaplin left the U.S to fink work because he was blacklisted. Only 10% of the artists succeeded in rebuilding their careers.

Dalton Trumbo

HUAC hearing

Arthur Miller

HUAC vs the playwright

Paul Robeson, 1949

immediately after the Peekskill Riot

Ralph Ellison

'Invisible Man'

The Weavers

Lillian Hellman

Wonderfully atmospheric shot of the brilliant playwright who stared down HUAC

'Masses and Mainstream'

1953

'High Noon', 1952

Gary Cooper stars in the film by blacklisted writer Carl Foreman, a perfect allegory for the isolative stand of those who opposed HUAC and McCarthy

'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg

The militantly revolutionary Gay poet's groundbreaking work, 1956

Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee

the couple modeled the concept of the artist/activist with their brilliant acting abilities and consistent place on the front lines of the struggles for civil rights and labor unions

Beat Poets

In this 1959 photograph taken in New York City, composer/musician David Amram (top right) is seen with some of the artists, poets and writers who would become the leaders of "The Beat Generation." They include (clockwise from Amram): poet Allen Ginsburg, writer Gregory Corso (back to camera), artist Larry Rivers and author Jack Kerouac. Photo: John Cohen, Courtesy of david amram

En Route to Chicago, '68

Jean Genet, William Burrough, Alan Ginsberg--noted poet-activists who were also loud and proud Gay liberationists

'What's Going On?'

Marvin Gaye

The Last Poets

1968: the interplay of free verse poetry, improvisation and the politicis of race and revolution

'Ohio', 1970

CSNY's song offered chilling, driving commentary on the shootings at Kent State University

War Is Over!(if you want it)

A Christmas message from John and Yoko, Times Square, NYC, 1970

Bob Marley

"Get Up, Stand Up"

Samuel Friedman

The Socialist Party's cultural leader seen here in a 1977 pic with his wife. Friedman was a journalist and activist who, after the dissolution of the SP's arts efforts, became one of the Party's candidates for often on multiple occasion (photo by Steve Rossignol).

Peter Tosh

'Talking Revolution'

Rock Against Racism

here's the album collection which chronicled the 1976 and '78 British concerts established to fight the rising trend of neo-fascist skinhead gangs in the UK

Robert Mapplethorpe

This gifted, militantly Gay photogrpaher set off a firestorm of controversy in opposition to the neo-cons of the Reagan administration and the Edwin Meese "decency" doctrine.

Patti Smith

brazenly outspoken punk poet and activist, late 1970s

'Reds' 1982

Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton as John Reed and Louise Bryant, en route to Petrograd

ROCK AGAINST REAGAN

The Dead Kennedys headed up the bill for this protest concert, Washington DC, 1983

Nuyorican Poets Cafe

'Bedtime for Democracy'

Public Enemy

Karen Finley

The sexually provacative feminist performance artist did constant battle with the neo-cons of the 1980s and '90s and became a poster child for right-wing calls to suspend funding to the NEA

'Mumia 911'

This series of arts-actions occured in multiple spaces throughout NYC and other cities in an attempt to raise both funds and awareness for the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal, journalist and Black Panther who was framed on a police murder charge in the lates '70s and continues to sit in death row now. For this event, NY's Brecht Forum hosted an all-day marathon on September 11, 1999, the house band of which was led by John Pietaro.

Pete Seeger, Music in the History of Struggle, 1999

with the Ray Korona Band, John Pietaro on percussion. 1199SEIU auditorium, NYC

Ani DiFranco

Fred Ho

The revolutionary saxophonist/composer has successfully forged an avant garde music which bridges improvisation and New Music composition w/ Marxism, Maoism and traditional Chinese folk art.

'Not in Our Name'

Charlie Haden reunites his revolutionary ensemble one more time to speak out against the Bush administration's manipulations of the populace, 2005.

The Brecht Forum

The Brecht Forum/NYC Marxist School came to be a fixture of Left education and culture in the early 1970s lasting through 2014.

New Masses Nights

Joe Hill

The Industrial Workers Band

Arturo Giovannitti, around 1912

brilliant IWW poet/organizer who composed epic pieces about his imprisonment and the struggle for a more equitable society

Ralph Chaplin

IWW songwriter and journalist who penned "Solidarity Forever" in 1911

John Reed at his desk

note the Provincetown Playhouse poster!

Robert Minor, 'The Masses'

July 1916

Louise Bryant

Crusading journalist seen here approx 1918

Max Eastman

writer, activist, editor of 'The Masses'

Isadora Duncan

Modern Dance in revolution

Robert Minor

The radical artist and leading CPUSA functionary

Michael Gold

Cultural conscience of 'the Daily Worker', 'New Masses' and acclaimed proletarian novelist seen here addresseing a May Day crowd on the streets of Manhattan, early 1930s.

"Costume Ball--Where All Toilers Meet!"

The Daily Worker, January 14, 1928

VJ Jerome

Communist Party cultural commissar

NYC, 1931: A delegation of the John Reed Club following a trip to Harlan County, VA

John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Sam Ornitz

'The Crisis'

1933, radical magazine of Black American militancy

Marc Blitzstein

member of the Composers Collective of New York

'Negro Songs of Protest'

Compiled by Lawrence Gellert, illustrations by his brother the great Communist artist Hugo Gellert. The songs were arranged by Ellie Siegmeister of the Composers Collective of NY

'The Workers Song book, Workers Music League, 1934

compiled by the Composers Collective of New York

American Artists' Congress

Signed by AAC Secretary STUART DAVIS

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera

"Class Struggle"

Diego Rivera's amazing work told the story of the workers' fight against capitalist exploitation --and was created as a commision for Rockefeller Center's main hall. It was not long before John D had the piece destroyed.

'Processional', 1937

modernist drama by John Howard Lawson, a leader of CPUSA cultural activists

The Almanac Singers, 1941

THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS

Woody

Silent speak-back to HUAC

George Orwell

the British writer maintained his democratic socialist views through his great novels

Earl Robinson, ca 1940s

member of the Composers Collective of New York, leader of the American People's Chorus and a musician of the people throughout his career. Among his compositions was "Joe Hill", "The House I Live in", "Ballad for Americans" and "Black and White"

Hanns Eisler, HUAC hearing, 1947

Trumbo and Lawson

Paul Robeson at Peekskill

Flanked by unionist and Communist guards, staring down the fascist mobs at Peekskill NY, 1949

Sinclair Lewis

'It Can't Happen Here'

Dashiell Hammet

closing out the HUAC onslaught

'Salt of the Earth'

Paul Robeson shouts down HUAC

"You are the Un-Americans--and you should be ashamed of yourselves!"

W.E.B. DuBois

Stockholm Peace Conference, 1955

'Rebel Poets of America', 1957 LP

Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Amiri Baraka

"We Insist!--Freedom Now Suite"

Max Roach with Abbey Lincoln

Lorraine Hansberry

Peter, Paul and Mary

1963 March on Washington

'Spartacus', 1964

The tale of a unified slave revolt was first written by Howard Fast in novel form and then realized for the screen by Dalton Trumbo

Bill Dixon's OCTOBER REVOLUTION IN JAZZ, 1964

John Coltrane

Seen here performing his powerful piece, "Alabama" on German television, 1965. The story of the church bombing which killed four African American girls and injured others was retold in this mournful work.

The Fugs

Radical Greenwich Village poets turn rock-n-rollers of a whole other sort, 1965

Freedom Marching

James Baldwin, Joan Baez, and James Forman (left to right) enter Montgomery, Alabama on the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights, 1965.

You Can't Jail the Revolution

Shades of Chicago, '68

Sam Rivers

The great jazz musician who helped to found the avant garde loft scene in the 1960s was devoutly outspoken with regard to radical politics and the incorporation of same into his music. He is seen here performing at his own NYC space, Studio Rivbea. From the look of that tom-tom to the left, the drummer is Milford Graves who not only broke new ground into improvisational music but its part in Black liberation and other revolutionary struggles.

Henry Cow, late '60s

British avant rock band also engaged in social statements and celebrated the music of Brecht & Eisler

Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra

1969: Bassist extraordinaire Haden (right) unites with pianist-arranger Carla Bley (left), trumpeter Don Cherry (kneeling) and a wealth of others to create a radical album of anti-war music. Included in the collection was a powerful reconfiguring of Brecht and Eisler's Song of the United Front

Gil Scott Heron

"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"

MC 5

Kicking out the jam as well as the walls of conformity

Rally for John Sinclair

this fund- and awareness-raising event was in honor of the noted anti-war activist who'd been arrested on trumped-up drug charges. It featured John and Yoko, Alan Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Archie Shepp, Commander Cody and a host of others

Art Ensemble of Chicago

Revolutionary composition/improvisation: "a great Black music"

Victor Jara

The great Chilean revolutionary songwriter

TILLIE OLSEN w/MAYA ANGELOU

Writers March Against Apartheid, 1970s

Frederic Rzewski

In 1975 the composer created "THE PEOPLE UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED", inspired by the struggles of farm workers and militants around the globe

Richard Hell

Nihilistic poet of punk performing with the Voidoids at CBGB

ABC No Rio

activist performance space, NY's Lower East Side

'London Calling'

The Clash

Fela Kuti

Revolution in song from Nigeria

'Bonzo Goes to Bitburg', 1985

The Ramones satiric commentary on Reagan's visit to the Nazi soldiers cemetary

'Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing'

Artist Space, NYC, 1989: reactionaries tried at all costs to shut down this boldly outspoken exhibit on AIDS

Day Without Art

Visual AIDS and other arts activist organizations created a Day Without Art to commemorate World AIDS Day

Tupac Shakur

Militant Hip Hop 101

'Somebody Blew Up America'

Amiri Baraka, fearlessly taking on the controversial causes of the 9/11 attacks

Robeson

After falling victim to a nation which tried to disappear him, Paul Robeson is honored with his own stamp

The first Dissident Fest: The Dissident Folk Festival 2006

This event featured Malachy McCourt, Pete Seeger, Bev Grant, Lack and a bevy of radical jazz musicians, poets and more